W"th the 1994 appearance of the

stage musical Beauty and the

Beast, a new part of the Disney

empire was born: Disney Theatrical.

Through clever costume design in

particular, that show managed to translate

many of the visuals of the film onto the

stage to create a spectacular pantomime

that could run year round, around the

world.

The question it didn't immediately answer,

though, was what Dis~~y Theatrical would do next. How many times would the public take a stage show filled with people dressed as

scaled-up versions of the on-screen characters

- giant plates/candles/teapots - before accusing Disney of following a formula?

Especially when renting the video costs just a

few pounds, while taking a family to see the stage show is starting to edge into hundreds

of pounds.

Strangely, the project they chose next was perhaps the least likely candidate from their

back catalogue: The Lion King, a more complex story with shades of Hamlet rather

than pantomime. Evil uncle Scar kills the lion

cub Simba's father, the lion king Mulfasa, in order to take his place on the throne; the cub

enters self-imposed exile, eventually returning

home to triumphantly rescue his kingdom. Even if that story could be told, how would it

be staged? Actors dressed as Cats had already been done, and that show was still running!

Despite the doubts of many so-called experts,

the show opened in 1997 to triumphant reviews, in a production that re-invented the film in a style that encompassed the musical

sounds of Africa (through the work of South African composer Lebo M) and presented it in a uniquely theatrical manner. The show swept

the 1998 Tony Awards winning the best musical, best director of a musical, best choreography, best set design, best lighting

design and best costume design categories. Now, after a two year wait, London has its chance to sample the show that is still wowing

audiences every night in New York.

DESIGN

The Lion King's distinct visual style stems from what many considered to be Disney's bold

choice of director - Julie Taymor, a multi­skilled artist billed not just as director, but

also as costume designer, mask and puppet

rrs lrr1 co-designer and author of additional lyrics for the show. Her productions

over the years have become renowned for their use of puppets and masks, and this continues in Lion

King. Her early fascination with the show came from the challenge of

portraying the variety of creatures

THEATRE

required without resorting to fluffy, Wizard of Oz-style lion costumes with actors completely

hidden inside.

The eventual solution, evolved through a long

pre-production period, was to create masks

that have the lion's head floating above the

performer's head, keeping the human visible

while clearly defining who they are playing.

The masks of the principal male lions have a

further trick: mask and puppet co-designer

Michael Curry devised a mechanism that

allows the lion head to suddenly lift up,

forward and away from the actor, the effect

suggestive of a lion's mane rising as they

confront each other.

The concept of revealing the performer inside the animal became the guiding

principal for the rest of the cast, and is

achieved in many ways. Giraffes, for -->

Audiences

clearly love

this show,

enjoying it

for its beauty

and magic

rather than

trying to

analyse what

the masks

mean or

study the

hundreds of

years of

international

theatrical

b'adition

that lie

behind

them. That,

perhaps, is

Taymorand

her team's

triumph.

all the way."

example, are a performer standing on two short stilts who

leans forwards propped up on two longer stilts that become the animal's front legs, with the long neck-and-head resting upon their own head. The effect, particularly in silhouette,

is stunning. More difficult characters take the split between character and performer further: Timon the meerkat - one

half of the typically-Dimeyesque comedy duo with warthog Pumba - is the extreme, a complete character puppet attached to the front of his performer and manipulated by

movements in the performer's torso, arms, legs and head. This puppet is the most Beauty and the Beast-esque in the show, and could easily have been an actor in costume. But it

is remarkable how quickly one stops watching the performer and focuses on the character he is bringing to life - while at the same time fully aware of the work the actor is doing.

The scenic environment supporting these creatures was created by designer Richard Hudson, well known in the UK

for his work for subsidised theatre and opera companies.

Zimbabwe born and educated, Hudson turned to these African roots for his design which had to allow Taymor's varied

creatures to be presented in what appeared to be the vast open plains of Africa, while also taking the audience to the

other locations demanded by the script. The design looks

simple in picture or model form - but even the expansive Lyceum had to have its basement excavated further to

accommodate the set's mechanics.

The basis of the set is a big open space backed by an

enormous eyclorama. The stage space is made to feel 'epic' because the eye isn't hemmed in by the usual black legs and

borders. Instead, the legs are white light boxes that extend the feel of the eye to the side of the stage, while the borders

are white cloths with curved edges that feel like floating

clouds - both can be covered with black masking for the darker, spookier scenes such as those in the elephant's

graveyard. Flying (including performer flying by Foy) and tracking modify the space further. Two huge skeletons are

trucked on for the elephant's graveyard (which also features a compressed-air powered smoke geyser effect devised by

Howard Eaton Lighting. to replace the expensive-to-run liquid nitrogen effect used in New York), while the stampede

that leads up to the death of Mufasa and Simba's subsequent

exile is achieved using an upstage scrolling painted cloth then a series of rollers containing increasingly-large wildebeest

models with side portals creating a valley; an old-style effect,

but an effective one.

The most complex feat of engineering is the floor. Downstage this contains

three lifts that can drop right down into the substage area to allow performers to be set and

then rise up to stage level.

Upstage is a section of flooring that is automated

to allow it to be raked for certain scenes, and within that is the complex, nine

tonne drum revolve. This can be used as conventional turntable, but also houses

the raised spiral of Pride Rock; one half of the

revolve's surface

turns and opens and, as the revolve turns

further, the semi­circular Rock

telescopes up and unfolds into position.

All of the scenic engineering was carried out by

Delstar Engineering. with

the scenery built by Terry Murphy

S!=enery and the rigging work by Vertigo - the

same three companies who collaborated on the London version of Beauty and the Beast, and it works well - the low noise levels as

scenery moves being particularly noticeable. Control for the revolve and the flying pieces, all of which are automated, was by Jetter Automation, a name more familiar to those who

specify automated handling systems for factories than to theatre practitioners.

The show's long fit-up period was masterminded by

production managers Stewart Crosbie and Simon Marlow,

along with production carpenter Mickey Murray, Vertigo's

project manager Ken Mehmed and, it seems, most of the

carpenters working in London. The potential nightly backstage chaos, with scenery and animal costumes stored in

every spare centimetre of the Lyceum's wings (with 14 chain

motors simply for storage), is now run by stage manager Greg

Shimmin with the show called by deputy stage manager Claire

Libbey - from the traditional British wing location rather than

the front-of-house location initially suggested by the

American producers.

LIGHTING

"I had a good time in London: the crew were outstanding.

one hundred percent behind the show, albeit with lots of friendly ribbing - both ways!• is how lighting designer Don Holder recalls this, his first experience of working in the West

End. The team garnering the praise was led by UK associate lighting designer Alistair Grant and production electrician Pete Lambert and included Chris Dunford and Steve Reeve, plus a selection of guest electricians, all working alongside Holder's

US associate Jeanne Koenig Rubin and VL programmer Aland

Henderson.

Holder's aim for the London production, as with all of the departments,

was essentially to re-create the American show; that design won him the

1998 lighting Tony award. However, he notes: "We were aware of the concern about the economics of the production, particularly because

ticket prices in London are lower than in New York. But we'd also

already done the show a number of times, in Minneapolis, New York and Japan; this experience let me go back through and take some things out

of the rig. The result is fundamentally the same, yet the rig is cleaner -and the whole production feels richer and denser.#

The core of the rig is moving lights - by a quirk of history, Uon King's

moving light rig is practically identical to Beauty's (Disney had a leased Vari•Ute package from a Beauty tour which closed early and just moved

it over) with a sizeable core ofVL2Cs and VL4s backed by just a few

VLSs and VL6s: four High End Studio Colors on the circle front round out the rig. London continues with this rig partly because the show exists

in Artisan format, and partly because the lighting team haven't yet found

a match for the VL4 washlight that does a great deal of eye lighting work

in the show.

The sizeable conventional rig became the subject of a fierce bidding war

that ended somewhat controversially with the contract awarded to

Westsun in Canada, who have supplied the American productions of the show. The majority of the equipment and cabling in the rig appears to be

new, as the company quickly learnt about the UK and West End markets

- in particular the need for CE marking and the requirement to permanently install equipment for long-running shows. Production

electrician Pete Lambert notes that the advantage of having everything

bought specifically "was that we could specify exactly how we wanted things, down to the lengths of tails on multicores, H and the result is a

beautifully neat installation.

It is also an enormous onel The Lyceum's existing 400-odd Strand LD90

dimmers are all used. But 345 new ETC Sensor dimmers in seven racks have also been installed in the grid, one running from a 110V transformer

and feeding the 110V elements of the rig, such as the 240V-unfriendly

lines of seven M16 flood battens called for by the width of the set. The

new dimmers were installed by Stage Electrics ( who carried out the original dimmer installation during the Lyceum's refit, and are now

servicing the show for Westsun); they are fed from a new mains supply

run up from the basement by RWS Electrical, who also installed new,

Howard Eaton Lighting-built patch boxes with Socapex outlets around the grid that allow the rig to be neatly plugged up. The dimmers are

controlled from an ETC Obsession 2 located in the theatre's followspot

box, since the room set aside as the lighting control room doesn't actually allow a view of the stage I Vari• Ute control is now from a mini­

Artisan 2, after an Artisan was used to program the show; the consoles

are now run, and the rig maintained, by the show's resident electrics

team of Rachael McCutcheon, Alan Boyd and Duncan Elsam.

On the ends of the dimmers hang over 600 ETC Source Fours and the

huge array of floodlights that the eye, borders and side lightboxes

demand - 100-plus conventional LliE 3-circuit Ministrips, plus over 70 custom Ministrips mounted in the leg lightboxes. There are also a line of

fluorescent floods at the base of the eye and 35 Altman n six-cell flood

units (12 flown, 23 as groundrows); these and the RDS Scene Machine

effects projectors had to gain CE approval prior to being used in London. The DMX network also controls 170 Wybron ColorRam scrollers, 18 High

End Dataflash strobes ( these mounted into short-nose Par can housings to reduce flare), five 2.5K RDS Scene Machines (used for clouds and

projecting the tiny dots that form one stunning transformation

sequence) and two Pani BP2.5 projectors, mounted on a circle front bar

re-engineered to accommodate their depth. Custom rigging was also created for the on-stage ladder positions, sections of which are hinged

and tracked to allow them to roll out of the way of passing scenery.

With a large eye, lightly-coloured floor and white legs and borders, one

of the most challenging aspects of the rig became controlling flare:

practically every lamp in the rig has a top-hat, the insides of these covered with flocking material. Lambert and his team are also now

intimately familiar with every light leak in every type of lighting fixture after spending a day covering them with countless

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The rig - particularly the eye lighting - works

hard through the show. Taymor's animal

costumes are seen to best effect when in

silhouette, and the silhouettes that Holder

creates are big, bright and intense; the

punchiness allows the feeling of the brightly-lit

sky to be retained even when light is added

downstage to build big, bright daylight states.

What's interesting is that Holder's lighting

seems to reflect the show as a whole in

dividing into two quite distinct styles.

There are the beautiful, heart-stopping

moments where the magic of masks, puppetry

and simple, elegant theatricality are used to their fullest effect, the most notable of these being the show's opening sequence. The

houselights fade, the colourful abstract frontcloth rises and light reveals firstly clouds rising up into space then a colourful , cloth sun

rising slowly rising from the floor. The first animals - those giraffes - appear on stage. Suddenly birds are flying overhead. Then the

edge of a gobo in the auditorium catches your eye and, as you turn, you realise that an elephant is lumbering down the stalls past

you! The sequence builds and builds, the African chanting slowly resolving into the

familiar form of Circle of Life, the hit song from the film, as the stage fills with creatures of all types and Pride Rock then rises to reveal

the king, the queen and their newly-born lion cub.

Then there are moments that seem somehow to owe more to Disney than to Taymor: a character sauntering on stage singing the

eighties pop hit 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'; another quipping that the scene "wasn't like this in the film\ while the Van•Lites do a rock-and-roll sweep out over the audience.

Holder handles these moments with style, though, as he does the moments where the lighting has to solve the purely technical

challenges of hiding the 'tricks' ( such as performer flying lines) or silhouetting the miniature puppets used in some scenes. But it

is the cyclorama, in particular, that lingers in the mind: dressed with floods, but then with areas picked out using the Vari" Lites; its

triumph is that it is never quite symmetrical, never quite even, which is what makes it live as a spectacular sky rather than just a well-lit cloth.

SOUND

The sound design for Lion King is in the hands of Tony Meola, who also worked on the more

recent Hunchback of Notre Dame for Disney in Berlin. Bidding for this element of the show

was again fierce - understandably, given the general expectation that the show will run and

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run • but the contract was eventually awarded to Autograph because of their proven ability to

support even the most complex shows.

Autograph's Andy Brown also served as UK sound associate, working alongside US associate sound designer Marie-Renee Foucher and assistant sound designer Kai Harada once the show moved into

previews and Meola jetted off to his next project.

The installation of the rig was overseen by production sound engineer Thomas Ashbee,

another Disney veteran after filling the same role on Beauty and the Beast in London. Though large, the basic rig isn't that outlandish in current musical terms. Vocals are collected by 40 Sennheiser SK50 radio microphones, some of these permanently attached to masks rather than to the performer's heads, and presided over by Nihal Badik and Paul Gatehouse. The orchestra, located in the pit with the exception of two

percussionists who are housed in auditorium boxes either side of the stage, are miked with a wide assortment of microphones from Shure, Sennheiser, AKG and Neumann, and the resulting feeds are collected by a 99-input, 14-subgroup, 14-VCA CadacJ-type mixing console with 89 of the faders motorised, run by Nicky Matthew.

This sound, along with a few effects replayed from Denon DN-995R MiniDisk players, then passes through Meyer CP-10 EQs, BSS TCS-804 delays, Apogee DA-800 and SA-700 amps and out to what appears to be a very small loudspeaker rig, particularly around the proscenium arch. This is, in

part, because vocals are fed out through four LA-28 speakers from Walt Disney lmagineering -wide-dispersion column speakers created for the theme parks that look like narrow tubes and are visually unobtrusive when mounted on pros booms. These are backed by six Meyer UPA-1 Ps, six UPA-2Ps and four USW-1 P speakers, all self­

powered . Tom Ashbee comments that his work has suddenly become much more like the lighting department's, because he's dealing with a mains installation rather than just low-voltage signals.

Each speaker is individually fed in case of

problems. The rig also uses Apogee SAT-3 and

AN-1 OOOx loudspeakers as front-fills and as a

surround-system used for effects and the vocal

sounds of animals who enter from the rear of the

auditorium during the opening sequence, with the

whole rig equalised using the Meyer SIM system.

More challenging for Ashbee has been the complex detailing required by the system. The

opening sequence animals are hidden in a section of the stalls bar prior to their entrance and therefore needed coverage for both radio mics

and the stage management's radio comms - yet this area was a radio blackspot. Local antenna therefore had to be concealed above the bar with

the cabling then following a complex route back to the stage (#there was one particularly nasty

void, and in the end we went and bought a

crossbow and used that to shoot the draw-line through!# the ever-inventive Ashbee recalls).

Video monitors were also installed in the bar area,

working as latecomer monitors for most of the show, but switching to show the conductor on an event from the Cadac.

The complex comms requirements also led to the decision to

install a separate feed to each Clearcom comms pack, fed from

an Autograph-designed power supply that cuts

off a pack in the event of a fault, leaving the rest of the comms

system undisturbed.

All this somehow left a

few dull moments in the long fit-up, which

the sound team filled by firstly fitting plexiglass side panels to

either end of the sound desk, then adding show logo decals. Bored

again during previews they installed ropelight to uplight the logos - and were planning to finish off

this project by wiring the ropelight to the houselights, so that it faded gently at the start of the show!

The show's sound, for the most part, fulfils Meola's stated ambition of making a sound that is "lush, as it is on the albums and in the film-. As

with Hunchback, it's not in-your-face sound, but rather takes the vocal sound and presents it to

you neatly, clearly and cleanly. It also manages to deal with the challenge presented by the younger audience present at the show, lifting the vocals

over their general ambient hubbub, the rise and falls of which dearly show which bits of the show bore them and which enthral them - though it is

slightly sad that they don't get to see the final moments of the curtain call, their view obstructed by the adult audience who rise to give the hard working cast a standing ovation.

A real ovation, though, with cheers and whistling

and boos for the bad lion, not a forced 'we've

paid our money, we feel we should stand' ovation. Audiences clearly love this show, enjoying it for its

beauty and magic rather than trying to analyse

what the masks mean or study the hundreds of

years of international theatrical tradition that lie behind them. That, perhaps, is Taymor and her

team's triumph. That and proving that a Disney

musical doesn't just have to be padded cartoon

costumes!

But even the success of this show leaves a question unanswered. For their differing styles, all

three of the stage shows (Beauty, Lion King and Hunchback) have effectively had the benefit of extensive try-outs in film form. Disney haven't yet mounted a successful new, theatrical show from

scratch. To see whether they can achieve that we must wait for Aida, opening in Chicago in

December and (they hopel) coming to a theatre near you sometime soon after that!

photos: Catherine Ashmore/Kirwin Millard